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.By analysingthe truth of propositions and the relations that unite them, one can define a field of logical non-contradiction: one willthen discover a systematicity; one will rise from the visible body of sentences to that pure, ideal architecture that theambiguities of grammar and the overloading of words with meanings have probably concealed as much as expressed.Butone can adopt the contrary course, and, by following the thread of analogies and symbols, rediscover a thematic that ismore imaginary than discursive, more affective than rational, and less close to the concept than to desire; its forceanimates the most opposed figures, but only to melt them at once into a slowly transformable unity; what one then dis-covers is a plastic continuity, the movement of a meaning that is embodied in various representations, images, andmetaphors.These coherences may be thematic or systematic, explicit or not: they can be sought at the level ofrepresentations that were conscious in the speak-ing subject, but which his discourse  for circumstantial reasons orbecause of an inadequacy in the very form of his language (langage)  failed to express; it can also be sought instructures that would have constrained the author the more he constructed them, and which would have imposed on him,without his realizing it, postulates, operational schemata, linguistic rules, a set of affirmations and fundamental beliefs,types of images, or a whole logic of the fantastic.Lastly, there are coherences that one establishes at the level of anindividual  his biography, or the unique circumstances of his discourse  but one can also establish them inaccordance with broader guide-lines, one can give them the collective, diachronic dimensions of a period, a genera] formof consciousness, a type of society, a set of traditions, an imaginary landscape common to a whole culture.In all theseforms, a coherence discovered in this way always plays the same role: it shows that immediately visible contradictionsare merely surface reflections; and that this play of dispersed light must be concentrated into a single focus.Contradictionis the illusion of a unity that hides itself or is hidden: it has its place only in the gap between consciousness andunconsciousness, thought and the text, the ideality and the contingent((168))body of expression.In any case, analysis must suppress contradiction as best it can.At the end of this work, only residual contradictions remain  accidents, defects, mistakes  or, on the contrary, as ifthe entire analysis had been carried out in secrecy and in spite of itself, the fundamental contradiction emerges: thebringing into play, at the very origin of the system, of incompatible postulates, intersections of irreconcilable influences,the first diffraction of desire, the economic and political conflict that opposes a society to itself, all this, instead ofappearing as so many superficial elements that must be reduced, is finally revealed as an organizing principle, as thefounding, secret law that accounts for all minor contradictions and gives them a firm foundation: in short, a model for allthe other oppositions.Such a contradiction, far from being an appearance or accident of discourse, far from being thatfrom which it must be freed if its truth is at last to be revealed, constitutes the very law of its existence: it is on the basisof such a contradiction that discourse emerges, and it is in order both to translate it and to overcome it that discoursebegins to speak; it is in order to escape that contradiction, whereas contradiction is ceaselessly reborn through dis-course,that discourse endlessly pursues itself and endlessly begins again; it is because contradiction is always anterior to thediscourse, and because it can never therefore entirely escape it, that discourse changes, undergoes transformation, andescapes of itself from its own continuity.Contradiction, then, functions throughout discourse, as the principle of itshistoricity [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]